Free SEO audit: how to check your website step by step

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a structured check of every important page on your website against the things search engines need: access, a clear topic, good titles and descriptions, sensible headings, speed, structured data and links. The output is a list of fixes, ranked by how much they matter.

A good audit also checks AI readiness now: whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity can read your pages and pick out clear facts about your business. If you're new to the terms, the SEO vs AEO vs GEO guide explains how the three fit together.

Work through the steps below in order. Problems early in the list, like a page Google can't crawl, make everything after them irrelevant for that page.

Step 1: Can search engines crawl and index your pages?

Start by confirming that Google is allowed to reach and store your important pages, because nothing else matters for a page that isn't indexed. Check three things: robots.txt, noindex tags and your sitemap.

• robots.txt should not block folders that hold real pages. A leftover Disallow: / from a staging site is a common and costly mistake.
• noindex tags should only be on pages you want hidden, such as thank-you pages or admin screens. Test any page with the indexability checker.
• Sitemap should list every page you want found, and nothing that redirects or returns an error. The sitemap generator builds one if you don't have it.
• Redirects should go in one hop to the final page. Chains of three or four redirects waste crawl time; trace them with the redirect checker.

Then search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If key pages are missing, Google Search Console's page indexing report tells you why.

Step 2: Do titles, descriptions and headings match one keyword per page?

Each page should target one main keyword, and its title, meta description and H1 should all say clearly what that page is about. Pages that compete for the same keyword split their chances, so map keywords to pages before you rewrite anything.

1. List your pages and give each one a primary keyword. Use the keyword explorer to see what people actually type.
2. Check every title is unique, starts with the keyword and stays around 50 to 60 characters. Paste a batch into the bulk length checker.
3. Check every meta description is unique and around 120 to 155 characters, with a reason to click. Our title and meta description guide has examples.
4. Check each page has exactly one H1 and that H2 and H3 headings follow in order. The heading checker shows the outline of any page.

Step 3: Is the site fast enough on mobile?

Speed is checked on mobile first, because Google indexes the mobile version of your site and most Indian visitors arrive on phones. Run your homepage and your busiest service or product page through the page speed checker and look at the Core Web Vitals.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how long the main content takes to appear. Large uncompressed hero images and slow hosting are the usual causes.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly the page responds to taps. Heavy plugins, chat widgets and tracking scripts are the usual causes.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the page jumps while loading. Images without set sizes and late-loading banners cause it.

You don't need a perfect score. Fix what's clearly slow, then move on.

Step 4: Are images, schema and social tags in place?

Images need alt text, key pages need structured data, and shared links need social tags. These are quick wins that are often missing on small business sites.

• Image alt text should describe what each image shows in a few plain words. Find empty ones with the image alt checker.
• Business schema (LocalBusiness or Organization) tells search engines your name, address, phone and hours. The schema generator writes the JSON-LD.
• FAQ schema marks up question-and-answer sections. Build it with the FAQ schema generator.
• Open Graph tags control how your link looks on WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Facebook. Preview them with the OG checker.

Step 5: Do internal links and content support each page?

Every important page should be linked from at least a few other pages on your site, with link text that describes where it goes. Pages with no internal links are hard for search engines to find and look unimportant.

While you're there, check content depth. A service page with two lines of text rarely ranks. Each main page should explain what you offer, who it's for, where you work, what it costs or how pricing works, and answer the common questions. The question finder shows what people ask, and the word counter helps you spot thin pages.

Step 6: Is your site ready for AI assistants?

AI readiness means AI search crawlers can read your site and find clear, quotable facts about your business. It is a newer part of an audit, and the checks are simple.

• Check robots.txt doesn't block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot unless you mean to. The AI crawler checker tests this.
• Publish an llms.txt file that summarises your business and key pages. See what llms.txt is or make one with the llms.txt generator.
• Make sure your About and service pages state facts plainly: what you do, where, for whom and since when.

For the full picture, read how to get recommended by ChatGPT.

How SEO Studio audits your site automatically

SEO Studio runs all of these checks for you. Paste your homepage URL and it crawls up to 50 pages, then writes the fixes rather than only listing problems.

• A keyword map with one primary keyword per page, so pages don't compete.
• New titles, meta descriptions, H1s, headings and image alt text for each page.
• FAQ answers with FAQPage schema, plus business, page and breadcrumb schema and social tags.
• Featured-snippet answers, an llms.txt file, AI crawler robots.txt rules and prompts to test your AI visibility.
• Three strategy options (brand authority, lead growth, long-tail), a PDF download, a WordPress push and monthly monitoring.

Reports can be written in English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French, Spanish or German. It's free, and it can't promise rankings, but it gives you a complete, ordered list of what to fix.